Viewpoint Otto Youngers:Benevolent Malevolence by Collette Chattopadhyay (Review from LA ArtCore Quarterly Sept-Dec 2004) Otto Youngers' sculptures explore the relation between contemporary, political and environmental events, and American media constructs of masculinity. Satirizing various male stereotypes, the current exhibit deconstructs image-concepts of the successful corporate man, the powerful military man, and the leisure class hunter and fisherman. Expanding feminist inquiries into socially constructed, gender types, Youngers joins contemporary artists such as Richard Shelton, Ray Beldner and others in suggesting the inherently rigid nature of such cultural cliches and their related social expectations. Creating politically charged, historically poignant, and theoretically tough works, Youngers asserts a belief in art's power to impact social change. Satirizing general cultural obsessions, rather than caricaturizing particular people, Youngers works profile men, animals, and occasionally a hybrid of the two. Working exclusively in wood, his sculptures at first seem coarsely carved, though in reality they manifest an array of surface finishes varying from roughly chiseled to smoothly sanded. In any given sculpture, selected areas are frequently more finished than others, lending interpretative focus and critique to individual themes. Extending a three hundred year tradition of visual satire, his sculptures aim to inform, provoke and even shock viewers. Raising a dissenting voice against pre-packed image bytes, he expands the sardonic dialogues of Daumier, Grosz, Dix, Baselitz, Balkenhol, Conal and others. Adding to the exhibit's strident and at times cryptic tone was the Brewery's small exhibition space, which felt overwhelmed and cramped in the presence of seventeen, predominately life-sized sculptural works. Playing off Rodin's renowned Burghers of Calais (1886), Youngers' Burghers of Metropolis (2001) spoofs the corporate male idea. Like Rodin, Youngers profiles a group of men and gives audiences a studied glimpse into their psychological condition. But where Rodin profiles seven tragic heroes from the town of Calais, France, who during the One Hundred Years War gave their own lives in exchange for the town's citizens, Youngers profiles three men who appear stripped of mind and soul, yet retain outward markers of American respectability, namely dangling ties and requisite work shoes. Defined predominately by robotic, skeletal frames, their bodies are surmounted with rough-hewn heads chiseled to reveal distinctive, individual characteristics. Nodding to the preeminence of work in daily life, Youngers also recasts the renaissance allegorical motif of the three ages of man into a contemporary study of the three stages of a corporate career. In Youngers' Burghers, a seated man with a double chin and neck wrinkles, represents an aging sixty-something worker, while behind him, a standing, twenty-something youth with an upraised arm seems to eagerly hail a taxi. Nearby a figure, perhaps in his forties, pulls a small wheelbarrow containing three brains, suggesting with Orwellian undertones that these characters have had lobotomies but don't even know it. Deconstructing the heroic dignity that Rodin and Social Realists once ascribed to the common laborer, Youngers renders modern society's corporate men as mere cogwheels in a social machine that renders them intellectually dead while keeping them physically alive. Across a small pathway, a second sculptural group of three male figures similarly invalidates another male stereotype. Entitled God's Army or Welcome Home, We're Here to Save You (2004), the work spins viewers' attention to the subject of military might as manifest in three interrelated figures. All have small, skull-heads that perch atop much larger bodies, metaphorically implying the men's diminished conceptual skill but Promethean physical force. While their upper torsos resemble skeletons, from the waist down they look like birds, sporting feathered limbs and eagle claws in place of legs, shoes or feet. Brandishing guns, two of the men-beasts appear to shoot into the gathered group of spectators while the third figure raises his gun upwards, as in a victory salute, creating an ironic commentary given the figures' potential reading as both hunter predators and potentially hunted prey. Above the group floats a pseudo winged putto, with its chubby little nude boy body lending an ironic air of simultaneous sanctification and dark levity to the tense scene. Utilizing familiar, even shopworn metaphors, to speak of life and death, Youngers disparages the media's bilious rhetoric of male, martial invincibility as grossly overwrought. Satirizing American society's addiction to testosterone highs, Youngers challenges viewers to reconsider the political and social implications of such exaggerated icons of identity and success. Intimating that this repertoire is not only corrupt but vulgar, his works suggest that conformity to type comes at a very high price. Amidst the dubious struggle for a classically triumphant ending, Youngers advocates for greater individual and collective wisdom, justice, and humanity. Collette Chattopadhyay is a writer, critic and art historian who is a regular contributor to Art Nexus, LA Artcore Viewpoint, and is a contributing editor to Sculpture Magazine.